Thursday, February 28, 2008

Disaster strikes!













It's been a long time since an update, but we have a good excuse. This is a picture of Apple's version of the "blue screen of death". Yes, Macs do melt down. 

In this instance my main system hard-drive on my video editing computer physically ground to a halt. The fine folks at Mac Service did a fine job at replacing the unit, although the data was a total loss. Fortunately I my back-up regimen saved my project media files (still working on Invasive Species videos) and parts of my operating system and applications. Despite the back-ups, it's still going to take a few days to get everything back in working condition. Deadlines? What deadlines?

Lesson: back everything up! Keep clones of system drives ready to go, as well as media drives. 

Geek out over, crisis over.  

Monday, February 11, 2008

Archive Film: Roosevelt Island



Roosevelt Island is one of the hidden gems of New York City. It's a small island nestled between Queens and Manhattan and can only be reached by an aerial Tram that parallels the Queensboro Bridge. Mystery surrounds it. Half of the island is sealed off from the public -- the ruins of a derelict psychiatric colony from the turn of the century. This film isn't about that though -- it's about my love affair with it's Tram.

I used to spend lots of time in New York wandering around with an old film camera. I'm happy to be able to give them new life here on the internet. This is from my personal archive, enjoy!

In current news I'm finishing up another project for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for their Invasive Species program. It's been an interesting process -- most of the work was done in the research phase where I gathered all my source images from a variety of research groups in the lower 48. It took a long time. For example, can you tell me where to get underwater images of a New Zealand Mud Snail? What about an escaped farmed Atlantic Salmon?

I thought so.